Top 10 Processes Enterprises Can Automate Using RPA

Technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent capture are opening opportunities to improve processes, and totally rethink them

However, with automation opportunities everywhere, where should enterprises start?

Foremost, when automation opportunities are everywhere, it’s pertinent to prioritise them. Here think high volume, high value and high stakes. To elaborate:

• High volume – these are highly repetitive processes and easy targets for automation, as they take significant time that could be spent on work that requires more human thinking-related tasks. 
• High value – these are important processes for the business, ranging from money-related processes such as sales quotes, those that create enhanced customer experience, reduce churn and so on. 
• High stakes – mistakes in these processes could potentially land the enterprise in hot water. For example, a copy-and-paste error could result in a costly compliance breach, or a process backlog could cause routine missing of deadlines. 

With an understanding of the kind of processes the enterprise wants to automate, here are 10 processes across functional departments where RPA can be applied:

1. Key stakeholder (vendor, customer, employee) onboarding

While these processes span finance and accounting, sales or new accounts and HR, they’re good candidates for automation as they all involve extensive paperwork, vetting, and lengthy back-and-forth between the company and the other party. RPA allows enterprises to design an automated onboarding process to even include automatic status communications and full integration with the enterprises’ internal systems.

2. User setup and configuration

We talked about employee onboarding from the HR side above. On the IT side, someone must add and configure a new user so that new employees can log into their computer, email, network, etc. RPA can automate this process so that staff can focus on higher-value work in the backlog and even discover even more ways to automate.

3. Key stakeholder (vendor, customer, employee) maintenance

Likewise, these parties often need to be updated. For instance, an employee may submit a change of address form, a customer may decide to re-sign a yearly contract. RPA offers excellent capability for automating processes that are triggered by another event (annual renewal), a date (all partner contracts are due 31 March), or a task (employee filled out a form for change of bank details). RPA ensures the data is accurately updated in real-time across all systems.

4. Report aggregation

Finance and accounting teams will know how time-consuming this process is, especially at the end of a month or quarter. RPA can automate the collection and aggregation of data in a fraction of the time, leaving the team bandwidth to leverage that information for insights.

5. Payroll processing

Ever-changing tax laws and regulatory reporting requirements, in addition to working with business systems that don’t talk to each other can swallow up days each month for payroll processing. RPA facilitates the collection and connection of that data across multiple systems such as time tracking, HR and employee management, accounts payable and general ledger. Moreover, RPA helps automate accounting reports for taxes and various departments.

6. Customer due diligence

Staying on top of and complying with regulations like Customer Due Diligence, Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering is expensive and challenging. RPA automatically acquires, enhances and delivers the precise data the enterprise needs to comply from any internal or external source. It can also review many more data points in a shorter time period to provide a more complete assessment.

7. Competitive pricing and monitoring

Shoppers are astute, and it has fast become the norm for them to look up product information and prices on their mobile phones in stores – or visit comparison shopping sites before making a purchase. The likes of Amazon too use repricing software to automate the time-consuming job of keeping up with competition. Similarly, it’s important for enterprises to know what their competition is up to. With the help of RPA, enterprises can monitor and proactively reprice in real-time so that they aren’t relying on outdated reports that typically take days and weeks to compile.

8. Order processing

This involves several time-consuming manual tasks like address verification, data entry, printing invoices and shipping labels, updating warehouse inventory, re-ordering if stock is low, and much more. With RPA, enterprises automate and orchestrate this process.

9. Shipment scheduling and tracking

Scheduling, updating and reporting shipment status between internal systems and portals is typically a manual job. If it isn’t executed smoothly, the price paid is in the customer experience. RPA extracts shipment requests from incoming emails, log jobs in scheduling systems and provides pick-up times in customer and/or carrier portals.

10. Customer relationship management (CRM) updates

Data entry such as updating the CRM system seldom features high up on anyone’s to-do list. Of course, information residing in this system offers critical insight for strategic decision-making. RPA delivers automatic updates by gathering intel on prospects and posting it in the proper fields in the CRM system. With RPA, enterprises deploy a digital workforce to execute repetitive tasks and manual processes – and thereby enable employees to focus on high-value activities and significantly enhance their productivity, efficiency and work quality.

About us:

TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/

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TMA Solutions Latest Brochure - Your Enterprise Software Developer

About TMA Solutions

TMA is a leading software company in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers and 22 years of experience in providing quality software services for clients in 27 countries. Beside 7 offices in Vietnam, TMA also has offices in Canada, USA, Japan, Australia, France and Singapore.

Please find more here: https://www.tmasolutions.com/files/TMA.pdf

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Robotic Process Automation (RPA): The Key To A Cost Effective Supply Chain Management

A research report by a management consulting company says about 64% companies have embarked on the journey to implement Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in order to automate support tasks. The same report outlined a critical fact that not jobs, but tasks are being automated, allowing employees to focus on high-value activities, freeing them of monotonous pieces of work across a myriad of industries.

Over the decades, enterprises have invested time, money and multiple other resources in building their supply chain infrastructures and processes. Even though the majority of stakeholders ranging from manufacturers, retailers to logistics providers have adopted some type of supply chain management system, the key challenge of end to end data integration along with process automation remains.

Users still, to this day, continue to copy/paste data manually between disparate systems in order to maintain communication and data exchange on a day to day basis. The ongoing dependence on spreadsheets, workflows and archaic processes that tend to involve a ton a “swivel chair” work like jumping from one app to another, copy pasting data and more clearly shows how much room there is for further improvement.

These manual, mundane and repetitive tasks are not only inefficient but play a major role in slowing your operations and tying down resources that can focus on more mission-critical tasks and contribute in a far more creative manner.

Robotic Process Automation in the supply chain has the potential to bring a drastic impact in terms of productivity, efficiency, and accuracy on the business processes industry. Robotic Process Automation in supply chain serves to automate processes that are carried on manually, leaving little room for errors and anomalies. RPA tools are basically software solutions residing on virtual servers that can be executed and shut down at the desired hour.

Automation through robots will allow organisations to recruit and train employees for problem-solving and brainstorming work, instead of repetitive robotic tasks.

It is not shocking when the study highlights that robotic process automation has resulted in a 43% time reduction for tasks such as credit, collections, billing, etc. These are tremendous gains for any enterprise, but would massively benefit organisations looking to effectively manage their complex supply chains. The implementation of RPA for the sake of supply chain has been slow, but looking at the gains at stake, organisations are now turning to automation to streamline the flow of products and gain a competitive edge with customers. But, how exactly can this leading technology effect change in that way supply chains have traditionally operated? What are the ground-level modifications enterprises need to make before they can dive head-first into implementing RPA in the supply chain?

RPA in Supply Chain Management – Use Cases

Robotic Process Automation is still in its infancy in supply chain operations, however, organizations have accelerated towards including automation in their supply chains to make them lean and efficient. Companies across industries such as healthcare, retail, and manufacturing have traditionally relied on technologies such as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), etc.

In the beginning phases of RPA, software robots were not flexible enough to handle the complex scenarios that sometimes sprung up as they were unintelligent and could only automate parts of the supply chain that were straightforward and followed a set pattern.

For anything else, manual intervention was critical. Fast forward to today, the inclusion of intelligent bots with machine learning capabilities and cognitive abilities has led us to make RPA systems resemble humans to an extent. With these technologies in view, we are moving towards automating tasks that are defined by business rules and pave instructions for processing inputs.

At the higher level, RPA can be used to predict outcomes and support complex decision making, thereby, helping employees with more than just robotic tasks. Here are a few areas in the supply chain domain that are ready to change with RPA

Order Processing And Payments

The order placement and processing part of a supply chain essentially consists of three phases-

• Product selection
• Payment processing
• Order placement confirmation

There are still businesses within a set of industries today that rely on old manual paperwork to process transactions which can be entirely digitized. Order processing and payments can be automated such that information can be directly ingested into the company database, payment gateways can process the desired amount, and a software solution can send out email and text message confirmations for the placement of order.

As on today, with the advent on AI and RPA, multiple insurance companies rely on bots to automate claims processing as well and by automating this back-office work, organizations can ensure their employees focus on quality tasks that require human intelligence.

To optimize productivity and create a smooth supply chain, organizations will need to ensure these tasks are tightly integrated and make sure there are no glitches from order placement to delivery.

Email Automation

Well-maintained supply chains take care of one aspect dearly. Communication. A large part of any supply chain is maintaining proper communication with suppliers, manufacturers, transportation service agencies, and customers. Even though concise and effective communication is such a critical part of supply chains, it is often the one that has major need for improvement, too.

To ensure proper collaboration between staff in different departments, email communication needs to be set up with RPA. It is critical to lay down processes of communication when shipments have been successfully delivered, when they are stuck midway or delayed, and when they need to be canceled. Effective communication between all parties involved needs to be ensured such that the customer gets a smooth experience.

Inventory Management Automation

At the core of supply chain lies inventory management. Suppliers and manufacturers always need to be aware of their inventory levels and ensure they have enough products and spares to meet demands. RPA can make inventory management easier by keeping a tab on inventory levels, notifying managers when product stock levels are low, and automatically reordering products that go below a certain threshold level.

Additionally, an RPA system can help predict the optimal inventory levels by taking into account the historical data and sketching out patterns in demand. It would make the inventory management process efficient and always updated to accommodate spikes in demand.

Enhanced insights can lead to better decision making when it comes to restocking of inventory, thus resulting in cost optimization at all times reducing spares. As employees are freed of the monotonous task of maintaining records of inventory levels, they can focus on other mission-critical areas of the supply chain.

Vendor Selection

Vendor selection is usually an entirely manual process and RPA aims to change that. At the ground level, a vendor selection process consists of several steps such as –

• Preparing a request for quotation
• Communications and discussions with vendors
• Analyzing vendor documents
• Evaluating the vendor and cross-checking their credits
• Finalizing the vendor

With the right RPA implementation strategy, all of these tasks can be made more efficient, productive, and automatic. Human intervention, then, is only required to carry out the initial phases of specifying the project, generating a list of vendors, and engaging in face-to-face negotiations. Apart from these instances, humans will not need to intervene in the vendor selection process once RPA implementation is completed for an enterprise.

Shipment Status Communication

Most businesses regularly receive shipment status inquiries from customers. The manual process looks like this- an employee would personally open each email, address the query by making a note of the shipment and then looking it up in the ERP software to reply back to the customer with the exact shipment status.

However, with the introduction of RPA in this case, the complete process right from- opening the email, making sense of what the customer needs, logging into the ERP system, to communicating the exact status to the customer- can be automated. In such a case, human intervention would only be necessary for some exceptional circumstances that are beyond the handling potential of a robot.

Supply And Demand Planning

Before automation, supply and demand planning wasn’t exactly a cakewalk for the employees in any organization. They had to seek and gather the required data, combine the data and manage it in presentable formats, analyze exceptions to the data, and then communicate the plan.

RPA, with the help of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, can enable organizations to predict demands and be prepared to cater to the unexpected spikes in demand. By automating a majority of tasks in the supply chain, organizations can now eliminate the possibility of manual errors and make operations efficient, self-driven, and smart.

To put things into perspective, it is wishful to think Robotic Process Automation can automate an entire supply chain at this stage. Because supply chain operations also include the front-desk operations, building and maintaining client relationships, and so on which goes on to show that human intervention is still needed to some extent in a supply chain.

Challenges In RPA Implementation For Supply Chains

According to a report published by a consulting management company, there are still quite many challenges organizations face when they begin to strategise RPA or go at it for the first time.

Here are the top 5 challenges the report highlights –

Process Standardisation – Complex processes lead to complexity in the robot. At all stages of the RPA journey, organizations face process standardization as a critical challenge. Complexity in processes hike the costs of implementing RPA while increasing operating costs and business disruption. Organizations, unfortunately, realize that where proper documentation exists, even in those places, the processes are not always well understood.

IT Support – The support and consultancy of an IT organization are vital while strategizing RPA in supply chain. It is essential and advisable to include an IT organization throughout the RPA implementation process.

The Flexibility of Solution – RPA, at the outset, used to be considered a stagnant automation process. It carried a notion that robots will only learn once and that they need to be taught perfect lessons for them to perform later. Thanks to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, solution flexibility can now be added to all stages of automation, though agility is perceived as a challenge.

Stakeholder Expectations – Stakeholders have now started warming up to RPA, but it is a significant challenge to it up the priority ladder, and make sure it does not amount to complete disruption.

Employee Engagement – Organisations that have succeeded in scaling RPA had first engaged their employees and built buy-in to change processes org-wide. Though things vary across organizations, there is a need for enterprises to take steps so that employees accept RPA with minimal resistance.

Final Remarks

For a successful implementation of RPA in Supply Chain, four elements need to be addressed –

• Bots for product movement through the facility 
• Sensors to collect data about product quality 
• Cognitive learning software systems 
• Artificial Intelligence implementation to make the process lucid and flexible 

Putting these pieces together is an understandable challenge but strategizing and planning each part of the implementation process & integrating a transformation mindset into everyone in the organization would help to set the tone for change.

If looking to partner with a digital transformation company, enterprises need to take an end-to-end approach with RPA in supply chain implementation to achieve full benefits and realize the anticipated ROI.

Moreover, one-size-fits-all is no model for digital. What organisations need is an IT partner who can tailor RPA implementation services for their needs, keeping into account the present state of affairs and the end goals. Robotic Process Automation in comparison to traditional automation, not only substitutes labor but revamps everything an organization was built upon.

Over the years, as RPA has gained significant momentum and has been implemented across a smorgasbord of industries, the questions around its hype, hidden risks and more have been well and truly answered. The results have been very successful and Robotic Process Automation happens to be a rare instance of a technology delivering on its hype.

About us:

TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/

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Reducing offshore and onshore operation cost by implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Process automation market involves the combined usage of technology and products such as sensors, tachometers, and many others which facilitate the automation of tasks or processes in a business with minimal manual efforts. The main aim of process automation is to achieve cost minimization, greater efficiency, and streamlined processes. Before the implementation of the process automation, the tasks performed in the organization were manually recorded in books. This process increases the work and may include many errors while entering the data. With the implementation of the automated processes in the workplace, organizations save time and ensure best practices are implemented to improve the overall operational efficiency.

Before the implementation of process automation in HR onboarding, the administration schedules the meeting for candidates to complete the paperwork. After completing the process, the documents are to be handed over to the administration. Continuous follow-ups and in-person checks are required to ensure the document review. The entire process may take over an hour.

After the implementation of process automation, the steps involved in employee onboarding are reduced, which will eventually reduce the time taken for the process. Similarly, the implementation of process automation in various sectors, such as food and beverages, automotive, oil & gas, and many others is expected to reduce the number of steps involved in the process, thereby increasing the revenue of the company.

R&D Investments & Initiatives

One of the Robotic process automation startup named "Automation Anywhere" has announced the investment of $300m to introduce the advanced RPA with bot. This investment makes them one of the world's fastest growing companies. Along with the increasing investments, the automation companies are also planning to develop a new application, which will be built and deployed through API, microservices, and containerization. These approaches are expected to make the applications more scalable and reduce the deployment time. In future, the APIs are anticipated to play a crucial role in the European region, where regulatory measures such as payment services directive (PSD) and other open banking services in financial institutions is expected to increase the investments on these technologies.

Challenges

1. Lack of skilled workforce

This is considered as one of the biggest challenges in process automation. The implementation of process automation in any company needs appropriate and well-versed employees who can understand and solve the issue in the company. Having a well-staffed and knowledgeable team on hand to help with the automation issues is one of the ways to expedite the implementation process. To overcome this challenge, companies are planning to train the employees, which is expected to increase the skilled workforce in the company.

2. Lack of funds in SMEs will reduce the adoption of process automation

The implementation of RPA in companies can help in improving the revenue of the company by 30%–60% without any great difficulty, however, the expenses may increase more than five times the normal expense. This is because to implement RPA, companies have to redesign the process. Redesigning the process will cost money. Also, the company has to bear the training expenses of the employees. This is expected to increase the operational cost for the company in the first 3 years.

3. Key Players

Some of the major companies in process automation provides different module analysis, such as software systems, which include Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC), Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), and Distributed Control Systems (DCS). A company is planning to shift towards the use of the modular automation, which helps in reducing the time taken for the process and also helps in increasing automation efficiency and improve production flexibility. This modular automation is said to be the future for flexible process plant production and a key element for industrial IoT and Industry 4.0. Another company is planning to link the latest technologies, such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and digital twins in process automation. This link is expected to boost the productivity to a new level.

About us:

TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/

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HCL to invest $650 million in Ho Chi Minh City IT centre

Hindustan Computers Limited (HCL), one of three largest IT companies in India, expressed its interest in developing an IT centre in Ho Chi Minh City with the total investment capital of $650 million, and generating 10,000 engineering jobs.

On May 17, at a meeting with the vice chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee Tran Vinh Tuyen, HCL deputy chairman cum strategy director Sanjay Gupta said that the company is looking to develop the project within the next five years.

Being one of the three largest IT companies in India, HCL earn a revenue of $8.4 billion a year on average. If the project comes true, it will be a highlight of HCL’s overseas investment plan.

To learn more, please visit https://www.tmasolutions.com/news-events/351/hcl-to-invest-650-million-in-ho-chi-minh-city-it-centre 

About TMA Solutions

TMA is a leading software company in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers and 22 years of experience in providing quality software services for clients in 27 countries. Beside 7 offices in Vietnam, TMA also has offices in Canada, USA, Japan, Australia, France and Singapore.

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Banks, insurers lead the way in RPA.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is gaining momentum inside banks and insurance companies as part of digital transformation, says a global research firm.

"RPA is an important part of most organisations' digital transformation strategy, in particular the financial service insurance sector," said the research manager of the company.

The adoption of RPA in Thailand is growing fast among banks and insurance companies, standing out in the region.

The main reason for the increase in adoption of RPA for automating key tasks and decisions is its potential to increase business process and IT operational efficiency, but it can also impact customer experience, , business and manufacturing processes, and strategies.

The most common processes considered for automation in financial services are mortgage processing and loan restructuring, as well as performance-related tasks such as compliance reporting, performance and financial reporting.

Insurance-specific tasks such as claims processing, underwriting and pricing, policy administration and servicing can also be automated.

Financial and insurance companies can achieve costs savings in the range of 30–60%. But actual numbers would ultimately vary based on the cost base, the market, the business process itself and the investments needed to support RPA.

The implementation time required is also short, usually ranging from six to 12 weeks.

Based on the research, technology buyers can break even on RPA investment within 10 months to two years.

With RPA, the turnaround time to complete a process can decrease significantly. Early indicators point to a reduction of turnaround time ranging from 50% to 90%.

The intelligent digital workforce comprises intelligent digital workers -- essentially software robots that can perform both deterministic and non-deterministic tasks by continuously understanding and and analysing structured and unstructured data.

In other words, the intelligent digital workforce is progressively graduating from merely mimicking human actions to augmenting human intelligence, as well as evolving quickly to achieve the potential of autonomously emulating this intelligence.

The term intelligent automation is also used by the industry to refer to the intelligent digital workforce.

These "workers" represent rules and judgement-based automation and, like their human counterparts, they are both self-learning and self-healing workers that can discover patterns to predict decisions and even offer recommendations to improve them.

Automation should proceed in financial services because of RPA, as well as across the entire intelligent automation spectrum.

About us:

TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/

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Naver bets high on mobile payment service in Japan

Naver is going all out to target the mobile payment service market in Japan through its Japanese subsidiary Line in tandem with the country's policy to move toward a cashless society.

Line's mobile payment service Line Pay. / Captured from Line website

Line is the Japan-based mobile messenger operator owned by Naver, Korea's largest portal operator. 
Based on the huge influence of its mobile messenger service in Japan, Line, which launched its mobile payment service Line Pay in 2014, has carried out aggressive marketing to be a frontrunner in the market, in which it has to compete with large Japanese companies such as Rakuten and NTT Docomo as well as global tech giants Apple and Google. 
Last year, SoftBank also joined the competition, establishing PayPay, a joint venture formed by SoftBank and Yahoo Japan.
Amid intensifying competition, Line has invested heavily in its mobile payment service.
Naver said Thursday that Line would invest 30 billion yen ($274 million) in marketing in a bid to attract more users to Line Pay. 
Naver CEO Han Seong-sook vowed to continue to invest in Line Pay, saying there were high hopes for growth.
"The Japanese fintech market has great potential for growth on the back of the Japanese government's promotion of a cashless society," she said during a conference call after the firm's January-March earnings were announced. 
"We believe that it is very important to dominate the market in advance this year, thus we will make more active investments."
The Japanese government has been nurturing the mobile payment service market ahead of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, when many foreigners will visit the country. 
Line has made a series of investments in marketing, and the company said it would not receive commission from member stores until July 2021. 
But such aggressive investments have laid a burden on Naver, whose operating profit has been falling for six consecutive quarters. 
In the first quarter of the year, Naver posted 1.5 trillion won ($1.3 billion) in sales and 206 billion won in operating profits. Operating profits fell 3.3 percent from the previous quarter and 19.7 percent from the same period the previous year.
In particular, Line posted a 102.5 billion won operating loss.
"Line is aggressively moving to expand Line Pay's market share," said NH Investment & Securities analyst Ahn Jae-min. "The firm will continue to make aggressive investments until the Tokyo Olympics takes place. Therefore the firm's operating losses will continue for the time being."

About TMA Solutions

TMA is a leading software company in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers and 22 years of experience in providing quality software services for clients in 27 countries. Beside 7 offices in Vietnam, TMA also has offices in Canada, USA, Japan, Australia, France and Singapore.

To learn more, please visit https://www.tmasolutions.com/ 

By Jun Ji-hye

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Vietnamese startup wins $1 million prize of Startup World Cup 2019

Abivin, a Vietnamese startup to provide AI-powered Supply Chain Optimization solutions for enterprises, on May 17 won a prize of $1 million after it was crowned champion the Startup World Cup 2019 in the US, said the Ministry of Science and Technology yesterday.

Before, Abivin had won the first prize at the National Creative Innovation Contest held last year and became a mere representative of Vietnam to attend the Startup World Cup 2019 Champion, a global event where startups from around the world gather in San Francisco, to battle with startups from more than 40 countries including the US, Canada, Brazil, Japan, India, Singapore, South Korea and China.

Through four years of operation, the company has been known for its Abivin vRoute, a Transportation Management software which enables companies to reduce labor and energy cost by 40 percent.

Abivin is trained and matured by the Finland – Vietnam Innovation Partnership Program Phase 2 (IPP2) and joined series of other programs such as Shark Tank Vietnam, Techfest Vietnam. It also participated in international program comprising of Rice Bowl Startup Awards and the latest Startup World Cup 2019.

Founder of Abivin Pham Nam Long said that Abivin will use the $1 million prize to boost R&D for its AI-powered logistics optimization solutions. Additionally, the company will spend the sum on expanding its markets outside Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City and entering the foreign markets of Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and others.

The annual Startup World Cup is organised by Fenox Venture Capital with the participation of experienced investors in Silicon Valley-based global venture capital firms and in the globe.

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Defense agency surmounts ‘big’ security challenge for robotic process automation

The Defense Logistics Agency has finished a robotic process automation proof of concept that’s the first of its kind in government, allowing unattended bots to operate around the clock. 

RPA is software that mimics the keystrokes and mouse actions of workers to automate transactional tasks and processes — like moving name and location information from a spreadsheet to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. DLA estimates RPA will save its employees about 50,000 hours in its first year by taking over routine functions. 

But until now, most agencies have used attended bots given credentials from the laptop of the person they’re working with — as long as they’re on the clock. 

“We want bots to run 24 hours a day,” John Lockwood, RPA program manager at DLA, told FedScoop. “And we need the bots to have access when the individual isn’t there.” 

But for the last 10 years, “we’ve been anti-bot,” Lockwood added. 

Office of Management and Budget memo 18-23 and President Trump’s proposed 2020 budget proposal direct agencies to use RPA, and Federal CIO Suzette Kent has launched reskilling efforts to address the impacts of automation on the workforce. 

The Department of Defense relies on public key infrastructure (PKI) to verify that an employee is accessing its network, and some sites are common access card (CAC) enabled. Other agencies use personal identity verification (PIV) cards instead. 

The IT had to be tweaked so unattended bots could make use of PKI to access CAC-enabled sites — a “big challenge” that took nine months to surmount, Lockwood said. Essentially, the bot had to be duplicated to have its own persona and access. 

On May 6, DLA successfully had an unattended bot run on its own certification by reaching out to the agency’s ERP system, where it has an account, to receive its own credentials granting it access. The use case involved UiPath’s RPA platform and SafeNet’s hardware. 

The proof of concept paves the way for full implementation of RPA across agencies, which can choose to use an unattended or attended bot based on the work. 

“Not only are we replacing processes with robots, but new processes are coming on board,” Lockwood said. 

DLA automated five processes in six weeks to help handle all the data associated with standing up G-Invoicing, the Department of the Treasury’s solution for money transfers between agencies. 

The agency also created a bot to clean up spreadsheets so names of employees are standardized during onboarding and computer access can be more easily granted. 

RPA will help DLA respond to audit requests because, when a bot grabs information, all the steps are logged with time stamps, Lockwood said. 

Lockwood said a lot of agencies have created attended bots using individuals’ CACs. DLA intends to release a white paper in the next couple months allowing those agencies to use its RPA solution to operationalize unattended bots and will be sharing use cases and code, he added. 

Long term, DLA is looking at areas where getting information was “just too human intensive” but a bot could do the work cheaper and with faster computing power, Lockwood said. 

“Finally, we expect to see bots be a tool to utilize our management system and to utilize future artificial intelligence,” he said.

About us:

TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/

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Organic farmer urges youths to embrace opportunities in agribusiness

An organic farmer, Olusola Sowemimo, has advised Nigerian youths to embrace the numerous opportunities in agriculture.

Sowemimo, Founder, Ope Farms, gave the advice in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria on the sideline of the 2019 AgriTech Lab expo in Lagos.

She urged young people to be interested in agriculture as the opportunities in agribusiness were viable.

According to her, there is the need for youths to have the knowledge required so as to be successful in agribusiness.

Sowemimo said: “Youths can leverage the numerous opportunities in the agriculture value chain, which include content creation, processing, packaging, marketing, among others.

“There are areas of being producer, retailer, exporter, farm auditor, soil expert, among others.

“These will help them reap the benefits in the ecosystem.”

Sowemiwo said youths should show passion for agriculture, be patient and persistent so as to succeed in the business.

She said: “Young persons showing interest in agribusiness must have strong will-power not to give up.

“You must be creative and innovative.

“Do more research and ask farmers who know more about agribusiness.

“You must be able to market what you produce.

“You need to set standards in order to make it in agriculture, set your goals and pursue everything good that aligns with your vision.”

Earlier at the programme, Quan Le, Chief Executive Officer of Binkabi, a platform for issuing, trading and financing commodities on the blockchain, said the application of blockchain to agriculture would ensure many people involve in agriculture.

Le said Binkabi, a marketplace of connecting end-buyers and end-sellers of commodities, had partnered with Sterling Bank and AFEX to unveil a platform to digitise domestic and cross border agriculture commodity trading.

“Blockchain technology not only simplifies commodity trading, it resolves the inefficiencies and complexities in the food supply chain,” he said.

The convener, Oluwafemi Aliu, said people needed to be aware of agribusiness opportunities to take advantage of them.

Aliu, who is the Founder of MyFarmbase Africa, said the event was organised to democratise the opportunities in agribusiness, leveraging technology.

He said that AgriTech Lab 2019 provided participants with the AgriTech skills and education to plug into the employment and entrepreneurial opportunities in the African Agribusiness Landscape.

About TMA:

TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects.

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DevOps: What Do Governments Need to Know?

The speed at which technology is being produced it outstripping the pace at which better development tools are being introduced, which makes secure development even more challenging. Unfortunately, the negligence of organizations and authorities is intensifying the issue.

For this reason, organizations are adopting DevOps. for the betterment of technology. This way technology will be not only safe but also exciting to use.

The term DevOps is derived from software development (Dev) and information technology operations (Ops), combined to create better results when separate groups work together as one team.

What Can DevOps Do?

DevOps has to manage the IT infrastructure as per the necessity of the recommended software code that is dedicated in a composite multi-tenant environment. There is a requirement to have the resources for provisioning, to get the suitable deployment model and also to authorize and monitor the performance.

When DevOps is discussed, there is a requirement to have constant and incremental adjustments in the code versions so regular testing and deployment are possible. It might not always be feasible for DevOps to do coding from scratch, but they still must understand it.

DevOps needs to connect several elements of coding and desegregate various segments of SQL data management or messaging tools to release the working software, with operating order and production infrastructure. It could be both the developers who started into operations and the system administrators who started into the coding domain. Either way, there is a cross-connection work function that is seeing a massive upside in the style of software that is produced and used in mission-critical applications.

How Can DevOps Be Enforced Successfully?

Now that we have discussed what DevOps do, it’s time to learn the ways in which organizations enforce DevOps successfully.

Higher Authority

It is essential that we refer to higher authorities. By getting support from the top authorities, we can easily manage the work of DevOps.

“DevOps is fundamentally a reorganization.”

–Adrian Cockroft, lead architect, Netflix

Altering any management organization, with its deeply rooted techniques of functioning and complicated network of employees and suppliers, is a challenging job. So, solid backing at the beginning is as crucial as having employees. You cannot start a new technique without employee support; in the same way, you cannot begin a new plan without any support from authorities. You need someone from the top to monitor the work and provide feedback.

Blameless Postmortem

Adopting DevOps also requires every member of the team be comfortable in their learning. Hence, the blameless postmortem, which eliminates finger-pointing when things go wrong—highly recommended for DevOps beginners. Blameless postmortems are even required by some government offices.

Blameless postmortems organize a cross-section of those invested in the project to evaluate why certain outcomes occurred. The postmortems include an examination of the situation and ways to resolve them through various procedures or technology variations. They are an excellent method to initiate constant development.

Increase DevOps Engineers

Another effective way of expanding DevOps and enforcing it in the government is through hiring DevOps engineers. A DevOps engineer is the individual responsible for all the steps during the process of DevOps, and are responsible for bringing both organizations together to work as a team. There are not enough DevOps engineers today and the workload is much more than they can handle.

Start Small and Scale Up

Whenever you start something new, start on a smaller scale. Whether you’re working on a business plan or testing a new recipe, you should always start small and work your way up.

In the same vein, it is important to start small when implementing DevOps. Rather than go all-in at once, create a group of people who will work together as a team. If the results are good enough, then expand your implementations to a wider audience.

Eliminate Restrictions

Last but not least, it is essential to remove all the constraints involved. Eliminate any limitation that may occur during DevOps enforcement. Limitations could vary from generating new constructions or applying code variations to assimilating data foundations. If the constraints are not removed from the beginning, it may cause problems afterward.

Conclusion

With the expansion of equipment and expertise, new practices are introduced in the government. If applied properly, these practices could generate pleasant outcomes. DevOps, which brings together two forces for effective results, is one such practice.

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To overcome challenges from RPA

A lot of organisations already know the benefits of robotic process automation (RPA), but find it hard to know how to get started when it comes to their own projects. Who should be involved? Should it be driven by the business or IT? Should we know what we want to automate before looking for help, or start with a blank sheet of paper?

Automation means different things to different organisations, and there is no set place or time to begin.

The most important aspect to consider on the journey to successful RPA implementation is the human element and understanding how the introduction of technology will affect the people within an organisation.

Recognising resistance

We often find ourselves implementing modern digital technologies in established legacy environments, and that means teaching new skills to established teams.

Some teams will be more resistant to change than others, particularly if the organisation is used to working in silos. But what we have found makes the difference between success and failure of an RPA project is the level of buy-in within those established teams prior to kick-off.

What is required here is a cross-departmental stakeholder to help emphasise the business benefits of RPA; error reduction and 24/7 service chief amongst them. Of course, security tends to be perceived as a key issue in the deployment of robots too – the idea that the bots will somehow be beyond control. However, standard IT governance is almost always enough to ensure full compliance.

Most importantly in the pursuit of RPA happiness, businesses need to realise and communicate that RPA’s role is to automate tasks, not jobs.

Easy as 1,2,3

To overcome many of these hurdles and answer the important questions around RPA challenges, we recommend a three-stage programme.

Stage 1 Educate

We start with a proof of value or concept, to help organisations understand the power of RPA’s offering. They want to check that the technology works, that they can build the business case during this phase, as well as a delivery plan with the potential benefits and savings to be made. It’s key to work with leadership teams to explain the real benefits they can expect to achieve and within what timescale. The message then needs to be taken to the organisation as a whole around what RPA is and how it can benefit everyone. Factor in front-line staff to explain how they can work with robotics to automate the mundane elements of their job and get back to focusing on the customer.

It’s also really important to involve supporting departments such as HR and IT security to ensure that there is collaboration right throughout the organisation. This lays foundations for the long-term success of RPA.

Stage 2 Evaluate

This is the exciting stage whereby you get a specific business case live by automating a certain number of processes. Although focused on the technology, as this phase becomes visible to the organisation, a robust communication and change management program should be run alongside to keep the relevant people on board and updated.

Working with a small team of 3-4 people it’s reasonable to expect that you can design, build, test and implement one process within 40 days. It’s important to map a process that is right for a Proof of Value, something that is large and complex enough that it can prove a return on investment within 40 days, but small enough that it is achievable and won’t need to tackle the challenges which come with scaling an RPA solution.

The end result of stage 2 should be a working, automated process as well as a clear plan for how to take RPA forward – and most importantly an educated workforce that have learnt how RPA works and what is involved. Key here is to prove benefits of delivery, test and be able to hand back robots to the business if self-sufficiency is the objective.

Stage 3 Facilitate

The third stage of overcoming RPA challenges is building an operational business plan which creates a pipeline of automation of which processes and resources are likely to be involved. At the end of the day, any organisation’s ideal goal should be to become a centre of excellence for automation. A centre of excellence is an organisational structure that can be provided in-house or by a 3rd party, and should include business process support, software technical support and/or infrastructure support for all automation activities. Think of this as RPA-as-a-service.

An additional point to make here is that from the outset of your journey towards automation, you need to think about how this structure will look post-project. Is it best to have your centre of excellence run in house or in conjunction with a third party? This is a big resourcing consideration which might change throughout the Proof of Value stage but should be front of mind.


If you follow these three steps to overcoming RPA challenges, you won’t go far wrong. But given the importance of the human factor, these three principles of RPA should reign supreme.

Put people at the centre of automation;
Remove the mundane to make way for the creative;
Teach new skills to take advantage of new technologies.

About us:

TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/

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